Play On Perception

Counting down the lessons that could be learnt... Articles about Donald Trump

Lesson #4: Play On Perception

“If you want to sell a car and you spend five dollars to wash and polish it and then apply a little extra elbow grease, suddenly you find you can charge an extra four hundred dollars,” says Trump, “and get it.”

In the fine art of deal making that Trump has mastered, perception is often one of the most important factors that stands in the way of success. As a good salesman, Trump found it crucial to control the perceptions he was giving off to the other side. Aside from his all-important self-grooming in order to look as professional as possible, Trump became an expert in keeping up appearances when it came to his deals.

Trump’s success came from the fact that he was always able to maintain the upper hand in making a deal. While he was often in an inferior position to be making demands, Trump managed to convince property owners that his terms were the only ones worth meeting. “If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much,” he says. By over-selling himself and resorting to tactics of fear and guilt, Trump would always make himself appear as if he were the only man for the job.

Trump had an ability to make people see things the way he wanted them to and knowing this, used it to his advantage in making his multi-million dollar business deals. “When I build something for somebody, I always add $50 million or $60 million onto the price,” he says. “My guys come in, they say it's going to cost $75 million. I say it's going to cost $125 million, and I build it for $100 million. Basically, I did a lousy job. But they think I did a great job.”

When Trump was first starting out in the business, he had little experience building the types of projects he was envisioning and no experience whatsoever in a prime real estate market such as Manhattan. Thus, he encountered a lot of resistance when proposing his plans. But, being a master of persuasion, Trump did not let that stand in his way. In one of his very first negotiations to get the rail yard property along the Hudson River, Trump recalls that when speaking to the owner, “I couldn’t sell him on my experience or my accomplishment, so instead I sold him on my energy and my enthusiasm.”

In a similar situation when Trump was working on transforming The Commodore into the Grand Hotel, he instructed the architect to, “Make it appear that we’d spent a huge sum on the drawings. A good-looking presentation goes a long way.” Trump believed that a presentation that looked as if it were put together by an established firm with a large budget would be more credible than a few sketches done in Trump’s little, dingy apartment.

By making sellers believe that Trump was the best and only person to lead a redevelopment project, he was able to manipulate and manufacture the terms of his own success.